Daniel Jones has a new look; will he be a new quarterback for Giants this season?
Giants guard Greg Van Roten, left, and quarterback Daniel Jones during training camp in East Rutherford, N.J., on Tuesday. Credit: Ed Murray
The knee, he said, is a non-factor. The neck isn’t an issue either, he claims. Still, there remain plenty of unanswered questions regarding Daniel Jones for this upcoming season.
The beard, it seems, stands out among them. Is it staying?
“I don't know,” the quarterback said with a big smile on Thursday when the inevitable topic of his facial hair finally rolled around during his post-practice media availability.
He’s still sporting the neatly trimmed look that showed up early in training camp and which many believe has come to symbolize — if not directly imbue in him — a new spirit of confidence and bravado.
“Yeah, I've gotten a lot of questions about the beard,” he said with a laugh. “It's not a new me, but we'll see. We'll see what happens.”
Too bad. Maybe the Giants could use a “new me” from Daniel Jones.
Both the quarterback and his updated look will almost certainly be on the field Saturday in Houston playing in the preseason game against the Texans. He’s taken every first-team rep available to him since he was cleared to practice when the team reported in late July, but this will be Jones’ first crack at participating in an actual game since November when he tore his ACL in Las Vegas.
His first chance to show how far he has come in his rehab from that injury.
And, perhaps more importantly, his first real opportunity to demonstrate that he is not the underperforming, lackluster, lost-his-mojo quarterback he was in the first half of 2023.
Because it’s easy to forget that long before those physical hardships befell him and ended the first of four seasons for which he had just signed a $160 million contract, Jones’ play was already forcing many to ponder if the Giants hadn’t made a huge mistake in signing him to such a lucrative deal and for that many years. Now, with concerns about the knee and the neck — and eventually the beard — covered, the only real questions left are the ones about Jones himself.
Those are the most important ones. Those are the ones that the Giants have to get right for their immediate and foreseeable futures.
What kind of quarterback is he? As he enters his sixth season for the team, truth be known, we still don’t really know. He’s shown hints of promise, including a strong run late in the 2022 campaign that helped the Giants get to and win a playoff game (and led to that new contract), but he’s also more often demonstrated an inability to make the kinds of plays and decisions that championship teams need from their on-field leader.
Even throughout this summer’s training camp, Jones has sprinkled in evidence of both sides existing, sometimes on the same day, sometimes within the same drill. For every fist-pumping deep connection with rookie Malik Nabers or Jalin Hyatt he’s had head-scratching, worrisome throws that were intercepted or well off their intended target.
“He's doing a great job,” offensive coordinator Mike Kafka said of Jones on Thursday. “Each day he's just getting a little bit better. I think those are things that we've talked about, whether it's his footwork, whether it's his progression, whether it's just communicating with the offensive line and kind of getting that feedback as well. He's part of it. He's one-eleventh of that group, but he's a big part of that, and I think he's doing a really nice job.”
On Saturday, Jones will get to put it all together along with a good percentage of the other projected offensive starters in what figures to be as close to a real environment as the Giants can create before their Sept. 8 opener against the Vikings.
“It's the first time out in the game situation, live situation, so you want the operation to be clean, in and out of the huddle at the line of scrimmage, communicating with the guys and making sure we're ready to go,” Jones said of Saturday. “And then obviously you expect a high level of execution. I think we want to take what we've practiced, what we've prepared, and put it on the field. It won't be perfect, but we expect it to be good. So, I think we're ready to go.”
Jones will be test-driving his surgically-repaired knee on Saturday against opposing players who are allowed to pressure him, flush him from the pocket and tackle him. The Giants, meanwhile, will be test-driving Jones himself, seeing if he can still be the answer for them that he at one point seemed so clearly to be.
Pretty soon we’ll know for sure if the beard stays. At some point this season we’ll know if the quarterback who wears it will stick around too.
Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday's Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.
